The present disclosure generally relates to information storage. Users of electronic computing devices rely more and more on these devices to store information about their lives and their interactions with other individuals. For example, instead of writing down friends and business associates' contact information in physical address books, an increasing number of people store such information in electronic address books, or contact lists, made up of multiple contact records. These address books can be found in mobile telephones, email application programs, cloud-based email services, contact lists on social networking sites, stand-alone electronic contact record management applications, and publicly available business directories accessible through the internet.
A contact record can include information for a specific contact (e.g., a person or a business) and may include multiple entries. For example, a contact record for “John Milke” may include entries for John's personal email address, cellular telephone number, work telephone number, home physical address, picture, birth date, and job title. Each entry may include a value and a tag that identifies the type of the information. As an illustration, a contact record entry may include the value “johnm@exampleemail.com” and an associated “email” field type tag.
Identifying values stored in association with a particular contact record with different field type tags allows a computing device to perform different actions upon user-selection of the contact record entry. For example, selecting an entry identified as an “email address” in a display for John's contact record may generate a new email message that is addressed to the value for the selected record. Selecting an entry that is identified as a telephone number may initiate a call to the associated telephone number. Selecting an entry that is identified as a physical address may invoke the display of a map that presents the location of the physical address. The use of field type tags can also facilitate the exporting and importing of contact record entries.
A user of an electronic contact list can assign a field type to values that the user enters for an address book contact record entry. Assigning field types can be burdensome because users need to select an input box that is pre-associated with a field type and type the value into the selected input box, or type the information into an input box that can have multiple types and subsequently use an interface element to select a field type for the information.